


Atlas, Reborn

by zanni_scaramouche



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Basically I watched 1917 came home and wrote this, Desertion, Farm Boy Niall, Harry-centric, M/M, Narry - Freeform, Orchard really, Period-Typical Trauma, Sharing a Bed, Soldier Harry, Soldier Harry Styles, World War I, World War II, ambiguous war period, nialls knee, this is not my sandbox how did i get here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22355866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zanni_scaramouche/pseuds/zanni_scaramouche
Summary: There's mud in your mouth.
Relationships: Niall Horan/Harry Styles
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	Atlas, Reborn

**Author's Note:**

> !!!!
> 
> This is my first time in this sandbox and I don't know how I got here! I don't even listen to their music?? I just read the stories! And now I write them, too (I guess) This was going to be in France with Louis, but somehow we are in Wherever You Choose with Niall.
> 
> I have a broken arm and typed this with one hand. I didn't even read it over I'm so sorry I just wanted to post :')

There’s mud in your mouth. You’re not sure how long it’s been there, but its been gritting between your teeth and scratching at the back of your throat since you can remember. At least a few days then. It was there when the lieutenant sent your section on, and it thickened your tongue when you assumed control and yelled orders after the sergeants head fucking imploded two feet from you. His molars are in your hair. Three of you crawled and scrabbled and heaved yourselves out until you were running, running, running in mud you’d been suffocating in for an eternity. Mud in your balls, mud in your ears, mud in your mouth. Heavy and tragic and black. 

You didn’t stop running until you saw cherry blossoms. Dark bark painfully cutting under your tight grip as you hold yourself against a half-fallen tree. The branches still bloom. Clouds of white swallow you, caress your skin and catch on your eyelashes. The world is filled with a cloying sweetness that belongs to spring days and the sound of your sisters laughter. No footsteps accompany you. The air is weightless and whimsical and bright.

You’re crying. It started slow and silent, a tear navigating a jagged path until it crashed with the petals. It stains them auburn, from the sergeants blood and the earth crusted over you in layers inches deep. Then the crying came so fast and loud it knocked you to your knees, your head and hands scraping raw against the skin of the tree. It wracked through you like the charlie-horses the boys in your section used to wake you with, alarming and painful and honest. Now it's passed.

The sun is painting the world gold from it’s distant place on the horizon when you see him. His form doesn’t get much bigger when it approaches, but there’s a solidness to him you can appreciate if only to keep you anchored. 

“Right,” he grunts at the sight of you. 

His hands are firm when grabs the straps of your pack and heaves you to your feet. Your body allows it, even stays standing after he lets go. A shake of his sun bleached head and a push on your shoulder and you’re moving, left, left, left right left. You’re sucked into the rhythm of your heartbeat written in the dirt. Not until you’re in the shadow of the barn and watching him pull a stall door open do you see the extra half beat he takes on his left. Hay in one corner, a trough of water in the other. 

“Wash, sleep, shit outside.”

The words mean nothing to you. They mean everything. He’s gone before you can try any of your own. 

The water is glass in your mouth. It cuts away at the inside layers until you’re once again soft and pink from tongue to stomach. You drink so much of it you gag it back up onto the packed straw at your feet. You dunk your head for more. Removing the bag from your back feels like taking off your skin, and when the rest of your kit is off you are Atlas reborn, amazed you're not floating away in the wind like the cherry blossoms. You’re crying again, but you’re underwater and no one can hear the sound of you yelling. Water gathers in your lungs, now murky instead of clear. Compared to what you’ve been swimming through it’s practically glacial. You heave more of it over the hard edge of the basin and continue washing in hollow silence, your chest finally too sore to continue your grief. 

Trousers and an undershirt are left for you, threadbare but soft. Your kit goes in the water. The hay is old and dull, dry and scratchy for it and full of an animal's scent. It is heaven. Through the cracks in the panelled walls you see the sun resting on the hill. Blink. It’s a sliver. Blink. It’s gone. Blink. 

You wake with a start. 

There are no elbows in your ribs, no pack on your back, no helmet on your head, but there are boots on your feet and a gun- your gun. You slept with it in your arms but now its in a different pair of calloused hands. The stock of it is planted on non-issued boots. Your own hand holds an apple, the only thing you’d been able to find in the straw as you’d panicked. The gun flies towards you. 

“Don’t shoot your dick off.”

He leans against the stable wall and bites into an apple of his own, loud and messy. Your pulse doesn’t slow. Your own fruit is soft and mealy, harvested too late or stored too long. Its the greatest thing you’ve ever had and you eat the core without hesitating, gun resting in the crook of your elbow like an old friend. Speaking of, your kit is still dark with water where its hung over the wall. You grimace the thought of exchanging the dry clothes for their cruel embrace. Before you can move for it the man shifts. 

“Nah, mate. Needin’ a few more hours for that. C’mon, be useful meanwhile.” 

He’s got his arms crossed, his shoulders straight, his eyes unwavering. He stands like a lieutenant. This is why you follow him, despite the hands width of height you have on him. You chop fallen trees from the orchard into firewood logs. You push wheelbarrows across soft ground. You climb to the roof of the house and nail over the soft spots that are falling in, jumping down easily. He points and you nod and you stop envying him when he trips over air and yells like a man stepped on a landmine. He curses you until you back off, letting him right himself after a fair amount of effort and a vice grip on his knee. Minutes pass until he lets go and straightens. He spits in the dirt and pushes his sweat slicked hair off his ruddy face before he continues walking the way you were heading, chest still heaving. You follow slowly behind, watching the straight line of his shoulders and the unashamed tilt of his clenched chin. 

Together you run wire along the hole in the fence you tore through the day before. 

You eye the flat wide plains you can’t remember running over, so vast they leave no room between you and the horizon for the forest you’d tumbled through with guns at your back. Your platoon had been heading south-east. Your section of twelve men had been ordered east over trenches abandoned by all but the rats and the bodies they feasted on. You’d hit enemy fire on the third day, or rather, it had hit you. Your platoon is, at best, four days away. Four days across mine filled fields and trip wired trenches. No one will retrieve the bodies that fell beside you in those trees for a very, very long time. No one will know you are not lying cold beside them. This is what you try to convince yourself as you turn your back to the open land and walk towards the barn. 

He gives you another apple, soft and gone half brown on the inside. 

“Harry,”

“Not yet, it aint.” He bites into his own. 

“Lance Corporal Harry Styles.”

He looks at you like he can see the uniform on you, like he’s remembering what you looked like under all that weight. 

“Niall,” he hums. “Nothin’ fancy to it.” 

The dark comes early. When the sun rises your kit is dry as it’s ever going to be and you don’t put it on. You spend several days and several nights learning the itch of hay in intimate places. The calluses on your skin grow tougher and the sun starts to peel away your face now that it’s no longer hiding under grime. The only sounds are the wind in the trees and the hammer or the axe or the wrench in your hand, and occasionally Niall cursing as his knee gives out and he drags himself back up. You feast on apples and hot water tasting like the memory of potatoes and onion. 

One night it’s raining.The clatter against the tin roof makes your muscles tight with the memory of planes over head. It leaks down the walls and dampens the ground. You don’t hear the footsteps. The stall door slides open in a jolt. 

“Right,” Niall grunts, his halo of hair the only thing reflecting the light of his lantern. He turns away before you’ve thought to lower the barrel of your gun. You run a shaky hand through your damp curls. You can’t shoot him. You don’t know where he keeps the apples.

You follow him to the barn door and grip the cold steel in your sweaty palms. The path he leads to the house is nothing but greasy mud in the flickering light of his lantern. He calls halfway.

“Well?”

You can’t shoot him, but you wouldn’t mind giving him one in the head for how he walks away right then, taking the light until it’s a pinprick in a doorway across the lawn. Every step is the same sucking sound of the swamped trenches, every branch and gnarled root the same as a limb of the dead beneath you on no-mans. You’re shaking in the doorway of the house, not from the cold rainwater running down your fingertips, but from the images crashing like ocean waves in the storm of your mind. 

For all its faults of peeling paint and scarce wooden furniture, the house is dry. There’s a fire under the mantle. Niall takes the straw mattress next to it, but you’ve had enough of the straw in the barn for the polished floor to be a smooth, smooth blessing against your body. Through wet curls hanging loose in your face you watch the fire lick the corners of the room. 

The man across from you does not look like a man. His cheeks are smooth, his spine rounded, his lips slack. You realise it’s the first time you’ve seen him without the tight grimace of pain, and without it he rather looks like a boy. Perhaps it’s the knee that ages him. Perhaps it’s the silent house once meant for a family. You can’t tell if you’re blinking or the fire is flickering. Things go dark.

Someone is shouting your name. 

You launch yourself upright, muscles tense and shaking and sweating, good god you’re a mess. Niall watches from the mattress. You hear the rattle as he finishes a long pull from a silver flask and tosses it to you. You don’t bother to smell it before it’s on your lips, the searing burn of your throat bringing tears to your eyes. Regretfully you pass it back best you can in the dark. Not even embers remain in the pit and Niall curses when he can’t find the matches to start a new flame. 

After fussing with his boots he rolls his back to you. 

“Well?”

You discover straw is a lot more comfortable when its been pressed down and worn soft beneath a body for a number of years and there’s three layers of fabric dividing it from you. The things not big enough to make space between you, hardly big enough to hold you both pressed together as is. When your mind wanders too close to the edge of the forest and you’re whimpering as the rain beats around you like enemy fire, a heavy arm grabs round your shoulders accompanied by the solid press of someone at your back.

“S’okay, mate.” 

You left your gun across the room, you see the shadowed lump of it on the floor where you came from. His grip is awkward around two bulky wool coats and the restricted space. The rhythm of his breathing settles you faster than polished steel.

Three days later and you’re both red in the face. Every time you manage to siphon a bit of air into your lungs you catch sight of Niall, flat on his arse and giggling like a child, and you lose it.

“S’not funny!” He laughs and you shake your head, cheeks in pain from how wide you're smiling. 

“No,” you agree easily between gasps, “‘course not.” And you try for silence and barely manage two seconds before you’ve gone off again, your stomach aching. 

“Wanker.”

You can blame the belly full of the good stuff for what comes out of your mouth next.

“Bloody wish, haven’t had a propper wank since- since-” You try to stand still so you can concentrate, but your feet keep sliding beneath you and you’d both skipped lunch in favour for finishing the flask in Niall’s coat.

“You poor lad,” Niall moans from his place in the dirt, but he’s not meaning it, because he kicks out his foot while you’re still thinking about your dick and you go down with as much grace as he did. There’s a moment of stillness. The cold slick of mud seeps into your clothes and weighs you down. You stare at the sky, clear and blue. 

“Right,” you grunt. 

Niall’s not expecting it when you grab his shoulders and he goes down easily, your handful of muck landing beautifully across his face as he starts cursing. The two of you roll, the steady shove and pull of your muscles exhilarating for the first time since you were a kid. This is not sprinting from the end of an enemy rifle, it’s not hauling a body on your shoulders and screaming for a medic, it’s not life and death. Not war. 

It’s you, on top of a boy with eyes reflecting the sky, chests both heaving and lips parted. The weight of him beneath you is an anchor to this moment. You couldn’t imagine being anywhere else when his ribs are expanding with every breath beneath you and his hot hands are burning on your thighs that wrap either side of him. Holding, like he doesn’t want you to move. His eyes are bright diamonds against the dirt on his face. It’s impossible not to notice them glance down, or how they close as you lean in. There’s mud in your mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> To this day this is my favourite piece I've done. Something about it makes me sentimental! 
> 
> Awesome graphics over on tumblr, check it!   
> https://zanniscaramouche.tumblr.com/post/190961883861/atlas-reborn-theres-mud-in-your-mouth
> 
> Kudos are love <3


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